I’ve had an AppleTV since they were announced, I’ve used it off and on – was happy when they released the 2.0 software and have even rented a few flicks on it. It’s a great little gadget, but what I always hated about it was the fact that it had a 30gb hdd, which meant it had no room for my 200+ movies and 100+ tv shows, I could set up obscure syncing rules, but it always resulted in long syncs over wifi from my MBP to 

the AppleTV, and most of my library is on an external disk – which isn’t always attached. I’ve tried using airdisks (NAS mounted volumes on my Airport Extreme and Time Capsule) and the results were less than impressive, long times to start the movie, constant pauses and stutters. 

What I really wanted was to use that USB port on the back of the AppleTV and mount an external drive with all my media. Sure there were all sorts of ways, cracking open the case, adding services to the drive, tweaking settings, etc.. but I just wasn’t up to opening the AppleTV – why risk breaking something that I wanted to keep working?

I recently heard of a product called aTV flash – it basically is a software pkg you pay for and then download, it’s set up to copy itself to an USB stick, you then pop that into the AppleTV port and reboot – it software hacks the AppleTV for you – adding FTP, SSH support, a few media managers like Saphire and a menu that allows you to play ripped DVD VOB folder without having to encode them.

The install was a little wonky – I had to download 3 different software packages to enable all the features I wanted like USB HDD and AFP support. But in the end I have to say I am impressed. I can now hook up a USB drive to the back of the AppleTV that contains all my movies and TV shows and finally for the first time have instant access to my entire library.

BigIP

I’ve spent the last 4 or 5 days fighting this smart switch called a “bigIP” – there’s been something funky going on with it’s routing – I could ping from outside the switch into the server pool, but no matter what I did I could not ping from the server pool out – not only not able to ping, not able to communicate what so ever. I’ve been working with my network team and my BIGIP specialist to figure out what’s going on and the BIGIP guy is still working on it – He’s currently trying to downgrade it’s firmware from 9.12 to 9.11 in hopes that this might solve the issue. The confusing thing in all this is that in Data Center A the BigIP running 9.12 works fine and in Data Center B it won’t play (both data centers are exact copies of each other, with all data replicated ‘tween the two.)

At least tomorrow I get a break from messing with these and I get to upgrade apx 85 servers with the latest rev for our software – that should prove…. “fun”… I’m hoping it can be done mostly remotely, since this system still isn’t production, that affords me a little time to play.

I’m doing some cleaning up here – updating the main site, and the blog. I’m pretty comfortable on how the forum is looking – had a lot of help there from Gewalt. Episode 4 has been released and I’m looking for ideas on what episode 5 will be. I am also working on another virtual machine episode, there is so much to cover that the first podcast was just not enough.

New iPod nano’s expected – new colors, not really expected, but pretty cool. If I had a reason to get a new iPod I’d be eyeing the blue one myself. As for iTunes 8.0 – was expected as well, I saw a leak about Genius, but never understood what exactly it would do – I am pretty impressed with it so far, and am listening to a playlist made by it currently.

Definitely happy to see iPhone firmware 2.1 coming out (I hear Friday). Can’t wait, hopefully stability will return to the land of iPhone. I haven’t had too much trouble with it, but there are others out there that have to do a restore darn near every day.

It’s taken me a while to get the time and the resources to all align to get episode 1 together and out the door, but now it’s up! I am so excited, I hope this podcast will take off and others will find my tips and advice useful. I still have much to do this weekend, I need to update the website, clean up the forums. I have submitted the podcast to the iTunes site, and am still waiting for it to show up, until then here is the rss feed for manual subscription:rss

here is the direct link for episode 1: Episode1.m4a